Eastman museum lends luster to Upstate New York film festival

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The world’s oldest museum of photography and film is lending luster — and its fabled motion picture archive — to an eight-year-old film festival in George Eastman’s hometown.

The newly renamed “360/365 George Eastman House Film Festival” will screen a distinctive blend of films from the birth of cinema in the late 1800s through experimental works by contemporary independent filmmakers, organizers said Tuesday.

The six-day festival will be held May 5 to May 10 at theaters, cinemas and clubs around Rochester, the birthplace of motion-picture film. Known since 2001 as the “High Falls International Film Festival,” it will also retain its mission of celebrating the accomplishments of women in filmmaking.

“We really anticipate getting not only the best of the old, which we and George Eastman House thankfully can provide like no one in the world, but also the best of the new,” said the festival’s executive director, John Richardson.

The 360/365 moniker launched this fall refers to the festival’s fresh year-round focus “all the way around filmmaking from old films to new,” from shorts to features and documentaries, from movies made by noteworthy female directors and cinematographers to avant-garde offerings “made by crazy people,” he said.

Eastman House, anchored in the Kodak founder’s 50-room Colonial Revival
mansion, has been gathering up highly valued photographs and films since 1947. With more than 30,000 titles, it is one of four major U.S. motion-picture archives alongside the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Library of Congress and the University of California, Los Angeles.

It boasts 6,000 silent film titles as well as the archives of movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and filmmakers Cecil B. DeMille, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee, Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese.

More than 10,000 people are expected to attend the festival, up from 4,000 in its inaugural year.

“We are a museum open to all kinds of motion-picture achievement,” said Eastman House’s director, Anthony Bannon. “The festival will be too, and we will anchor it in history.”